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OpenClonk 4.0 released!

So, whats new?

Content, content, content:

The main new feature in this release is the new Missions scenario folder.The folder contains 9 settlement challenges, most of which have been created by the hands of the the very master of settlement: Sven2. Clonk-Karl and Maikel also contributed notably to the creation of this folder.

Other than the Worlds folder (renamed from Settlement.ocf) which contains mostly peaceful settlement rounds focusing on simple goals and an open world, the Missions folder contains settlement challenges, often with a story, where all players work together and need to find solutions or engineer technical constructions to solve to reach the scenario goals.

Below, let me spotlight a few of the new scenarios:

Dark Castle

Kill the evil tyrant King Horax in this combat oriented settlement round, featuring a rudimentary AI to oppose the cooperating players. The scenario was announced in this blog before, read the article here!

Acid Drilling

You will have to pump an acid deposit from the other side of a volcano to a basin into your home base here. For the lack of other power options in this scenario, you will have to use pumps to generate energy to power the pumps transferring the acid… wait, what?
Yeah, Sven2 and Newton reworked the pump to be able to generate power: If you pump liquids upwards, you need power, if you pump them downwards, power is generated. The bigger the height difference, the more energy is consumed / generated. Here, you can put this to the test.

The Parkour and Arena folder has also been extended by a total of four scenarios: Hot Ice, Volcano Escape, Volcano Escape EXTREME and Heart of the Mountain.

The first two have already been introduced in this blog, read the article here. Volcano Escape EXTREME is the same as Volcano Escape, only that the volcano is erupting while you escape, uh oh!

The last one, Heart of the Mountain is a huge randomized claustrophobic maze in which you must find a tiny gemstone deposit and be the first to carry one ruby back to the start, without getting killed by the other players who are greedy for it of course. It is easy to get lost, so every player gets a spray can to breadcrumb his way around the cave system.

Other features

Quadrillions of bugfixes!!! No, honestly, there hasn’t been any other version of OC for which so many long standing bugs have been resolved. Those visible in the bugtracker are only the tip of the iceberg. The biggest bug hunters were Newton, Sven2, Isilkor, Maikel, Clonk-Karl and Mortimer.

Oliver Schneider, Günther and Newton implemented a feature that makes keyboard input independent of the keyboard layout. So, you are using DVORAK, Neo or perhaps you are French? No problem the keys stay the same.

Following some interesting discussions about how to make mining more challenging, Newton added the firestone material to replace sulphur. From firestone veins, you can dig out firestones directly, so you have an early access to basic explosives. Be warned however, that explosions on firestone veins could lead to devastating chain reactions.
Also, Sven2 changed the pickaxe to not be able to go through granite anymore, making it a barrier more difficult to overcome.

There is much more, but I didn’t mention all the changes since there have just been too many minor improvements to existing scenarios and objects to mention them separately. Some new objects like the grenade launcher (play The Cauldron), giant cave mushrooms or the windbag (replaces the jar of winds) were introduced, Clonkonaut added quite a few sound effects and Newton optimized the installation size by about 20%.

Interesting for developers

A new, more powerful and and faster particle system has been introduced by Zapper. The particles are rendered much more efficiently now, making it possible to use particles much more extensively. Also, now as the particles are defined in C4Script via proplists, the developer gains more control over how the particles behave. See blog post and documentation. The fruits of his work can already be seen in the release, many particles have been reworked while being converted to the new system.

An even more dynamic way to create randomized landscapes. So far there was the possibility to either define the landscape through a static Map.bmp or through Landscape.txt for randomly generated dynamic landscapes. Now, Sven2 introduced a third method, Map.c which is even more powerful than Landscape.txt because it is executed as a regular C4Script. It can not only be used to create a randomized map but also to modify the maps as defined in Map.bmp or Landscape.txt. See documentation.

On that topic let me remind you that, Clonk-Karl added mape, a tool for editing and viewing Landscape.txts, to the repository. They are autobuild on each change to it’s source, see downloads page and manual and previous blog post.

Solid masks have been reworked by Sven2. Now, solid masks are set independently of the graphics. This, amongst others, enables to use solid masks for objects that use meshes instead of sprite graphics. See documentation and forum post.

Introduced cleaner, more upwards compatible way to save objects for scenarios by Sven2. If a scenario is saved as a scenario, the objects placed in the editor are not saved into a Game.txt but instead, the objects are serialized into Object.c, a regular C4Script file, in which only those properties are saved which are important for scenarios. See documentation and forum post.

Mortimer made debugging of future network (desync) issues much easier, he turned the DEBUCREC compilation option into a regular option, so anyone can turn this option now on to log huge amounts of internal debugging data for later analysis.

Many documentation updates (mainly Newton)

As the last content release lies more than one year in the past, remembering and gathering up all the features that were added during that time was quite the detective work. If I forgot anything noteworthy, please comment or write me and I will add it.

If you made it until here, I’ve only one thing left to say to you: What’s wrong with you, download and play already!! 😉

Have fun!

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on Sunday, January 26th, 2014 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Announcements.
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Thanks for every other informative blog. Where else may I get that kind of info
written in such an ideal way? I’ve a mission that I am simply now working on, and I’ve been on the look out for such info.